Time Travel Omnibus, page 875
I take my hand off the key. “Just tell me,” I said. “Whatever it is, your parents love you. You can work it out.”
She leans back against the passenger side door and curls her knees up to her chest, a little ball of misery. “Okay. Let me get it all out before you say anything else, all right?”
“All right.”
“They grew us from cells from our originals; ten of us per original. They used a viral injection technique to put extra-long tails on one of the strands of our DNA. You need more telomeres to slow down aging.”
The scientific jargon exiting smoothly from the mouth of a child could have been comic. But I had goose bumps. She didn’t appear to be repeating something she’d memorised.
“Each batch of ten yielded on average four viable blastocytes. They implanted those in womb donors. Two-thirds of them took. Most of those went to full term and were delivered. Had to be C-sections, of course. Our huge skulls presented too much of a risk for our birth mothers. We were usually four years old before we were strong enough to lift our own heads, and that was with a lot of physiotherapy. They treated us really well; best education, kept us fully informed from the start of what they wanted from us.”
“Which was?” I whisper, terrified to hear the answer.
“Wait. You said you would.” She continues her story. “Any of us could back out if we wanted to. Ours is a society that you would probably find strange, but we do have moral codes. Any of us who didn’t want to make the journey could opt to undergo surgical procedures to correct some of the physical changes. Bones and muscles would lengthen, and they would reach puberty normally and thereafter age like regular people. They’ll never achieve full adult height, and there’ll always be something a little bit odd about their features, but it probably won’t be so bad.
“But a few of us were excited by the idea, the crazy, wonderful idea, and we decided to go through with it. They waited until we were age thirteen for us to confirm our choice. In many cultures, that used to be the age when you were allowed to begin making adult decisions.”
“You’re ten, Kamla.”
“I’m twenty-three, though my body won’t start producing adult sex hormones for another fifty years. I won’t attain my full growth till I’m in my early hundreds. I can expect—”
“You’re delusional,” I whisper.
“I’m from your future,” she says. God. The child’s been watching too many B-movies. She continues, “They wanted to send us here and back as full adults, but do you have any idea what the freight costs would have been? The insurance? Arts grants are hard to get in my world, too. The gallery had to scale the budget way back.”
“Gallery?”
“National gallery. Hush. Let me talk. They sent small people instead. Clones of the originals, with their personalities superimposed onto our own. They sent back children who weren’t children.”
I start the car. I’m taking her back home right now. She needs help; therapy, or something. The sky’s beginning to brighten. She doesn’t try to stop me this time.
Glumly, she goes on. “The weird thing is, even though this body isn’t interested in adult sex, I remember what it was like, remember enjoying it. It’s those implanted memories from my original.”
I’m edging past the speed limit in my hurry to get her back to her parents. I make myself slow down a little.
“Those of us living in extremely conservative or extremely poor places are having a difficult time. We stay in touch with them by email and cell phone, and we have our own closed Facebook group, but not all of us have access to computer technology. We’ve never been able to figure out what happened to Kemi. Some of us were never adopted, had to make our own way as street kids. Never old enough to be granted adult freedoms. So many lost. This fucking project better have been worth it.”
I decide to keep her talking. “What project, Kamla?”
“It’s so hard to pretend you don’t have an adult brain! Do you know what it’s like turning in schoolwork that’s at a grade-five level, when we all have PhDs in our heads? We figured that one of us would crack, but we hoped it’d be later, when we’d reached what your world would consider the age of majority.”
We’re cruising past a newspaper box. I look through its plastic window to see the headline: “I’m From the Future,” Says Bobble-Headed Boy. Ah. One of our more erudite news organs.
Oh, Christ. They all have this delusion. All the DGS kids. For a crazy half-second, I find myself wondering whether Sunil and Babette can return Kamla to the adoption centre. And I’m guiltily grateful that Russ, as far as we can tell, is normal.
“Human beings, we’re becoming increasingly post-human,” Kamla says. She’s staring at the headline, too. “Things change so quickly. Total technological upheaval of society every five to eight years. Difficult to keep up, to connect amongst the generations. By the time your Russ is a teenager, you probably won’t understand his world at all.”
She’s hit on the thing that really scares me about kids. This brave new world that Cecelia and I are trying to make for our son? For the generations to follow us? We won’t know how to live in it.
Kamla says, “Art helps us know how to do change. That’s made it very valuable to us.”
“Thank heaven for that,” I say, humouring her. “Maybe I’d like your world.”
She sits up in her seat, buckles herself in. Shit. I should have made her do that the minute she got in the car. I have one of those heart-in-the-mouth moments that I have often, now that I’m a parent. “In my world,” she says, “what you do would be obsolete.” She sniggers a little. “Video monitors! I’d never seen a real one, only minibeams disguised to mimic ancient tech. Us DGSers have all become anthropologists here in the past, as well as curators.”
“Wait; you’re a what?”
“I’m a curator, Greg. I’m trying to tell you; our national gallery is having a giant retrospective; tens of thousands of works of art from all over the world, and all over the world’s history. They sent us back to retrieve some of the pieces that had been destroyed. Expensive enough to send living biomaterial back; their grant wasn’t enough to pay for returning us to our time. So we’re going to grow our way there. Those of us that survive.”
There are more cars out on the road, more brakes squealing, more horns honking. “I’m not going to miss mass transit when I finally get home,” she says. “Your world stinks.”
“Yeah, it does.” We’re nearly to her parents’ place. From my side, I lock her door. Of course she notices. She just glances at the sound. She looks like she’s being taken to her death.
“I didn’t know it until yesterday,” she tells me, “but it was you I came for. That installation.”
And now the too-clever bloody child has me where I live. Though I know it’s all air pie and Kamla is as nutty as a fruitcake, my heart’s performing a tympanum of joy. “My installation’s going to be in the retrospective?” I ask. Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m embarrassed at how eager I sound, at how this little girl, as children will, has dug her way into my psyche and found the thing which will make me respond to her.
She gasps and puts her hand to her mouth. “Oh, Greg! I’m so sorry; not you, the shell!”
My heart suicides, the brief, hallucinatory hope dashed. “The shell?”
“Yes. In the culture where I live, speciesism has become a defining concept through which we understand what it means to be human animals. Not every culture or subculture ascribes to it, but the art world of my culture certainly does.” She’s got her teacher voice on again. She does sound like a bloody curator. “Human beings aren’t the only ones who make art,” she says.
All right. Familiar territory. “Okay, perhaps. Bower birds make pretty nests to attract a mate. Cetaceans sing to each other. But we’re the only ones who make art mean; who make it comment on our everyday reality.”
From the corner of my eye, I see her shake her oversized head. “No. We don’t always know what they’re saying, we can’t always know the reality on which they’re commenting. Who knows what a sea cucumber thinks of the conditions of its particular stretch of ocean floor?”
A sea cucumber? We’ve just turned onto her parents’ street. She’ll be out of my hands soon. Poor Babette.
“Every shell is different,” she says.
My perverse brain instantly puts it to the tune of “Every Sperm Is Sacred”.
She continues, “Every shell is a life journal, made out of the very substance of its creator, and left as a record of what it thought, even if we can’t understand exactly what it thought. Sometimes interpretation is a trap. Sometimes we need to simply observe.”
“And you’ve come all this way to take that . . . shell back?” I can see it sticking out of the chest pocket of her fleece shirt.
“It’s difficult to explain to you, because you don’t have the background, and I don’t have the time to teach you. I specialise in shell formations. I mean, that’s Vanda’s specialty. She’s the curator whose memories I’m carrying. Of its kind, the mollusc that made this shell is a genius. The unique conformation of the whorls of its shell expresses a set of concepts that haven’t been explored before by the other artists of its species. After this one, all the others will draw on and riff off its expression of its world. They’re the derivatives, but this is the original. In our world, it was lost.”
Barmy. Loony. “So how did you know that it even existed, then? Did the snail or slug that lived inside it take pictures or something?” I’ve descended into cruelty. I’m still smarting that Kamla hasn’t picked me, my work. My legacy doesn’t get to go to the future.
She gives me a wry smile, as though she understands.
I pull up outside the house, start leaning on the horn. Over the noise, she shouts, “The creature didn’t take a picture. You did.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. With my precious video camera. I’d videotaped every artifact with which I’d seeded the soil that went onto the gallery floor. I didn’t tell her that.
She nods. “Not all the tape survived, so we didn’t know who had recorded it, or where the shell had come from. But we had an idea where the recording had come from.”
Lights are coming on in the house. Kamla looks over there and sighs. “I haven’t entirely convinced you, have I?”
“No,” I say regretfully. But damn it, a part of me still hopes that it’s all true.
“They’re probably going to institutionalise me. All of us.”
The front door opens. Sunil is running out to the car, a gravid Babette following more slowly.
“You have to help me, Greg. Please? We’re going to outlive all our captors. We will get out. But in the meantime . . .”
She pulls the shell out of her pocket, offers it to me on her tiny palm. “Please keep it safe for me?”
She opens the car door. “It’s your ticket to the future,” she says, and gets out of the car to greet her parents.
I lied. I fucking hate kids.
DECISIONS
Michael A. Burstein
Life is an endless series of decisions. Some carry far more weight than others, but they all need solid foundations. And the ultimate responsibility . . .
Commander Aaron Eliassen threw the tray across his cell. It smashed against the far wall, covering the white molded plaster in a mix of browns, greens, and reds. The tray slid down to the floor, clattered for a moment, then fell still.
Aaron glared around the small, featureless white room at nothing in particular. For the twentieth time, or the hundredth, or perhaps the thousandth, he ran and smashed himself against the locked door, hoping that perhaps this time he would break apart the unseen hinges.
As before, the door refused to budge. All he succeeded in doing was getting his blue jumpsuit even filthier than before.
Aaron placed his eye against the crack between the door and the wall, again trying to peer through to the outside, to get some idea of what lay beyond. He tilted and twisted his head to get some sort of view, but all in vain.
He shuffled back from the door until he stood in the center of the room, then looked up at the ceiling. Although he had not yet spotted a microphone or surveillance camera, he assumed he was being monitored. “You hear me?” he shouted. He pointed at the mess of food that lay in a lump on the floor. “Did you see that? I’m not going to eat anymore. Not until I get some answers.”
No one responded. Eliassen walked over to the discolored wall and stared at the gloppy mess of stew, asparagus, and gelatin. His stomach rumbled slightly, but he ignored it.
“Let me out!” he screamed. He beat against the door with both his fists in unison, and then when that got tiring he changed the rhythm. Right fist, left fist, right fist, left fist. He walked around the perimeter of the room, continuing to bang against the wall, until he had come back to the door and his hands felt raw. He dropped his arms to his sides, pant-ing. How many times had he done this? He couldn’t say. He couldn’t remember.
“Talk to me,” he said between breaths. “Someone, anyone, talk to me. Please.”
He walked over to the bunk, stared at it, and then, in defiance, he collapsed onto the floor. For the third or fourth time, he cried himself to sleep.
Aaron heard the voice, a deep one, calling his name. “Commander Eliassen. Commander Eliassen. Please wake up.”
Aaron opened his eyes and immediately shielded his face with his arm. A bright light shone through the open—finally, open!—door. A figure stood in the doorway, with the light forming an aura around it.
Aaron fought down an urge to jump up and run through the door, knowing it would get him nowhere. Instead, he eased himself up, barely noticing that although he had fallen asleep on the floor, somehow he had ended up in the bunk. “Who is that?” he rasped.
The figure nodded to someone outside, and the door clicked shut, once again blending into the wall with but a tiny crack around it. Aaron’s eyes adjusted to the ambient fluorescent light. He glanced at the far wall; someone had cleaned all of the food off of it, but a nauseating spot of brown color remained on the floor.
“Do you recognize me?” the figure asked.
Aaron studied the man’s face and body for a moment. Black hair, solid jaw, etched wrinkles, blue blazer—it could not be possible, and yet Aaron did recognize the man.
“Director Carter?” he asked softly. “Gabe?”
Gabe nodded, his lips pressed together tightly.
Aaron jumped out of the bed and ran towards his friend, a mixture of anger, fear, and relief playing out within him. He raised his arms, but whether he intended to hug Gabe or choke him, even Aaron could not say. He figured he’d decide once within range.
Before he could get too close, however, Gabe pulled a revolver out of a shoulder holster and pointed it straight at him. Aaron stopped short. He lifted his gaze from the gun and stared into Gabe’s eyes, trying to read his friend’s blank expression.
“Gabe?” he said again. “Is it really you?”
Gabe nodded once. “Yes, Aaron, it’s me. Please do not come any closer.” His voice sounded cold but uncertain.
“I don’t understand,” Aaron said.
Gabe held the gun steady. “If you get violent, I will shoot you. If that doesn’t stop you, the soldiers standing outside will fill the room with gas and knock us both out.”
Aaron nodded. He backed away from Gabe with measured steps and sat on the bunk. “May I ask a question?”
Gabe slid the revolver back into its holster, but kept his eyes on Aaron the whole time. “Go ahead.”
“What the hell’s going on here?”
Gabe looked around the room for a moment. When his eyes finally settled on Aaron’s face, Aaron noticed that they were bloodshot. “Perhaps you can tell me,” Gabe said.
Aaron’s jaw dropped. “Ishould tellyou?”
Gabe nodded. “Yes. Tell me everything that happened after you returned from your mission.”
“After I returned? But the mission itself—I need to tell you about my discoveries—”
“Don’t!” Gabe shouted, holding up both his hands. “Only tell me about everything that happened to you since you landed.”
Aaron’s anger had disappeared into his confusion; it now returned stronger than before. He repressed an urge to spit. “Don’t you already know? Look around you!”
Gabe made no move to turn his head, so Aaron continued. “You locked me in a cell. You must know this already. Why are you torturing me?”
Gabe shook his head so slightly that Aaron could barely see it. “Assume I don’t know already. Assume I need to hear it from you. From the instant you made contact with Earth.”
Aaron yawned, cracking his jaw. “Well. The instant I made contact, hmm? Houston told me to bring her in at Edwards instead of the Cape. I came in fine, a perfect two-pointer.”
“And then?”
Aaron glowered. “And then a bunch of army soldiers grabbed me out of the shuttle and dragged me into this cell. No one listened to my protestations or questions; it’s as if I spoke Martian.”
“And what have you done since?”
“Done?” Aaron made no effort to hide the sarcasm in his voice. “Why, I took in a show and made out with a dancing girl. I’m planning to introduce her to Mom next week.” He tensed up. “What in God’s name do you think I’ve done?”
“I’m sorry. It was necessary.”
“Necessary? It was necessary for NASA to treat me like a common criminal? No—worse than a common criminal. No television, no radio, no Internet access—not even a telephone to call a lawyer, let alone my mom. Is this still America or what?”
Gabe lowered his eyes. “It’s still America.”
“How long have I been here? Counting the meals pushed through the slot and the cycle of the lights, I’m guessing four days.”
“Four days sounds about right.”
“ ‘Sounds about right?’ Don’t you know?”
Gabe placed his hand on his chest, near the holster. “Aaron, what’s the date?”
